{"id":5228,"date":"2023-09-11T06:41:22","date_gmt":"2023-09-11T13:41:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=5228"},"modified":"2023-09-11T06:41:22","modified_gmt":"2023-09-11T13:41:22","slug":"amy-chua-the-golden-gate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/amy-chua-the-golden-gate\/","title":{"rendered":"Amy Chua: The Golden Gate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This is a first novel from Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother<\/a>, <\/em>and it\u2019s an ambitious and almost overstuffed concoction set in 1944 San Francisco.\u00a0 Peeling away the many, many complicated layers of her story, the essential plot line is this: in 1930, two sisters were playing at the Claremont Hotel<\/a> while their mother played tennis.\u00a0 One of them dies by plunging down a laundry chute.\u00a0 Fast forward to 1944, and their grandmother is giving a deposition to the DA, who is sure one of her granddaughters (one of them the sister of the dead girl) is guilty of murder, and he doesn\u2019t mind charging them all if he can\u2019t get a straight answer from her.<\/p>\n

The murder: one Walter Wilkinson, unsuccessful candidate for president against FDR.\u00a0 It\u2019s an easy transposition to imagine Chua is writing about Wendell Wilkie, who did die young, but of a more ordinary heart attack, not a mysterious murder in a hotel room where he was shot at once, moved rooms, and ultimately killed successfully.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the background and setting that give the book it\u2019s almost overstuffed richness.\u00a0 There\u2019s the detective on the case, Al Sullivan \u2013 he has Americanized his name from Alejo Gutierrez as he is light skinned enough to \u201cpass.\u201d\u00a0 Much of the book centers on race and the sad fact of racial hatred, which, no matter the decade, is unchanged, it\u2019s just that sometimes the targets of the hatred change.\u00a0 In 1944, much of it was directed at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, and the US is living through the shame of Japanese internment camps.\u00a0 Al (or Alejo) is a smart, decent man, one who has some trouble with an ambitious boss who attempts to make every fact fit a pre-determined and convenient solution.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Madame Chiang Kai-Shek<\/a>, who indeed lived in the Claremont neighborhood from \u201943 to\u201944.\u00a0 The fear of communism was as intense as fear of Nazis at that moment, and Chiang Kai-Shek was the opposite of Mao Tse Tung. Some clues around the body seem to point to a Chinese involved solution.\u00a0 Chua also shares much of the history of San Francisco \u2013 as the whites settled and ravaged the native otters for fur, the Sequoias for wood, and asserted white dominance over the native cultures who had been settled in California for hundreds of years.<\/p>\n

All this detail, while interesting, sometimes clouds the bones of the mystery, which is an interesting one involving three privileged cousins, any one of whom could be a killer.\u00a0 What\u2019s certain is that all of them are gorgeous and seductively charming, and that they have a grandmother convinced of their innocence.\u00a0 Tying the narrative together is the lengthy and detailed deposition given by the grandmother, who tells the DA that none of her granddaughters are murderous.<\/p>\n

The other connecting factor is Al himself, who is fighting against not only a DA who is determined to solve the case, no matter the outcome, and the discomfort he\u2019s felt enforcing the internment rules against his Japanese neighbors.\u00a0 His own Mexican father had been forcibly deported when he was a child, but he seems reluctant to connect his experience to that of the Japanese.\u00a0 He\u2019s also trying to care for his niece, Miriam, whose mother has abandoned her and who, at 11, is basically raising herself.\u00a0 It\u2019s clear she\u2019s a preternaturally intelligent child and that the two of them are very fond of one another.<\/p>\n

Chua has created scads of fascinating background and an interesting mystery.\u00a0 While the threads connect, there are just too many of them, and she muddies the waters by changing the culprit several times.\u00a0 The Claremont is a fabulous setting for a mystery, though: a gorgeous, gracious hotel, seeming to float above the hills of San Francisco.\u00a0 This book has atmosphere and character and setting and plot \u2013 just too much of all of them.\u00a0 I would be interested to read a second book to see if Chua can winnow and edit. —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a first novel from Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and it\u2019s an ambitious and almost overstuffed concoction set in 1944 San Francisco.\u00a0 Peeling away the many, many complicated layers of her story, the essential plot line is this: in 1930, two sisters were playing at the Claremont Hotel … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1362,1360,497,10,1363,100,1364,1361],"class_list":["post-5228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1944-san-francisco","tag-amy-chua","tag-family-dysfunction","tag-historical","tag-madame-chiang-kai-shek","tag-minotaur-books","tag-the-claremont-hotel","tag-the-golden-gate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5228"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5245,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5228\/revisions\/5245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}